There was no escape. I was a cog trapped inside a machine. Locked, engaged. I couldn’t move without shearing the pins of my purpose.
I got rid of Hurst. He was finally allowed to fade into the background, where I’d tried to put him all along.
I know that nobody was getting any sleep that night, including me, and I just wanted somewhere that I could be, for just a little while.
Jenny’s part was almost over, and I would have been very grateful for something to say to her. But what could I say? Let’s go to bed and have something to remember each other by? Not with the microphones and the hidden cameras. Not with the mute eyes of the world and posterity, like Pinkerton’s, never sleeping, devoting their precious time and attention to me. I’d been in Jenny’s pocket for far too long. The only conceivable thing I had left to say to her was good-bye.
So I went to see Mike Sobieski.
He was nine parts of the way to happyland. Drugged to the eyeballs. He couldn’t even see me.
“What’s the time?” he said. His voice was firm, but none too healthy. He was living by hanging on to the hand of the clock. Doing his time the hard way, minute by minute.
“It’s twelve-thirty.”
“You should be in bed,” he said. “It’s way past my bedtime, too. But I guess it’s a special occasion. We can stay up late if we want to. It is you, isn’t it, Harker?”
“It’s me.”
“Can’t trust myself these days,” he complained. “I dream too much. All this firedamp they shoot into me. Don’t keep needles anymore. Have to use a gas pump.”
“Bad?”
“Bad! How the hell do I know? I’m as high as a kite, and I haven’t been down for a week. I wouldn’t feel a red-hot poker if it smacked me in the gut. I could be dead and I wouldn’t know.”
The whole string of patter was distressingly false. Those drugs might be killing all the pain, but tomorrow’s lift was flooding him with thoughts, and thoughts were painful — not in themselves, but because of the way they were running around his mind like bulls in a china chain store. I wondered if it might not be better to leave him to the ministrations of the doctors, but I didn’t suppose that the ministrations of the doctors were the most important thing in the world to him. My titan might be. He was only living the Project. There was nothing else left in him. He and Lindquist — a pair of one-eyed jacks.
“Anybody else with you?” he asked.
I shook my head, but he was still struggling to look expectant, waiting for an answer.
“No,” I said.
“My wife’s gone home?”
“I don’t know your wife, Mike. I didn’t see anybody.”
“What’s the doctor doing?”
“Sleeping. The nurse is outside.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “There’s a fair while yet. It’s all a formality tomorrow. Nothing can happen. Just take it easy till I get back. You can get excited then. I’ll have a drink for you, to celebrate for both of us. You get excited then — and to hell with the heart attacks. But not now, Mike, okay? I can’t take it. Just quiet.”
“I hope you can get in here,” he said. “With all the people. There’s bound to be people. No way of avoiding them.”
“I’ll tell them all to go to hell,” I assured him.
“Of course you will. Don’t spare the president. Tell them to go to hell. Shout into the microphones. They’ll cut it off the tapes, though.”
“Cynic.”
“I can afford it now. Project directors aren’t allowed to be cynics, but it’s after midnight now.”
“You’re still Project director,” I told him.
“Because I haven’t the strength to sign my resignation or the grace to want to? I’m an embarrassing accessory. The skeleton in the closet. Beyond that door — maybe just beyond the end of my own nose — Fred Jacobson is director. He can keep his face straight. I can pretend to be human now. I’m off the job.”
“That’s not what they say,” I told him. “It’s all your baby.”
“Yeah, well we all know what they say.”
“They mean it.”
“I hear what they say. Please do not disturb. You can look but you mustn’t touch. Patients should be seen and not heard. Everybody has to die by the book — discreetly. That’s what the doctors say. They’re my voice now.”
“You don’t have to listen to them,” I told him. “You’re the boss.”
“Don’t you believe it, son. Once they get you down they make damn sure you die by the book. Don’t die in bed, Harker. Die on Sirius Five or some planet of a sun we can’t even see. Do it your own way. If you don’t want to die their way they won’t let you die at all. Just keep you on as a machine.”
“I know,” I said.
“I only really sent for you to say one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I wanted to promise you I’d be here when you come back. They think I’m a good bet to fade out before then, but I want you to know I’ll wait. I’ll see you right, Harker. I’ll be here. You remember that.”
“I’ll remember it, Mike,” I said. “You’ll be here waiting for me. I’ll come straight here.”
I stood up and began to back away.
“Harker?” he said, his voice suddenly harsh.
“I’m still here,” I told him. “You want me to stay?”
“Hell no,” he said. “I’ll be asleep any minute. Just wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay, Mike.”
But he didn’t have a question. I knew he wasn’t out of his mind on the morphine high. Everything he said he knew he was saying. It was all important.
I went away, and I closed the door. Without a question, he wouldn’t be waiting for an answer. He knew I was coming back. There’d be time.
I rang Jenny from the nurse’s desk.
“What do I have to come back to?” I asked her.
“Figure it out,” she said.
“I count my blessings every time I have a second to spare,” I said. “It comes to zero every time.”
“Pessimism,” she said.
“Truth,” I said.
“Where are you speaking from?”
“Hospital.”
“You want a sleeping pill?”
“You have to be joking.”
“You won’t sleep.”
“Neither will you.”
“I’ll take a pill.”
“I’ve got to go now.”
“Good night.”
“And thanks.”
I put the phone down, scowled at the nurse, and went back to my apartment to sleep. I tried not to notice the eyes that followed my every move.
Cage of Darkness
Strategies
There are various strategies for doing time, but virtually all of them are applicable only to the ordinary prison term. The experience of Canaan time is intrinsically different, and the available strategies are considerably restricted.
Struggle — the refusal to capitulate — is obviously quite out of the question. One can be a rebel for two years or five, but the idea of maintaining a posture of rebellion indefinitely is quite meaningless.
The strategies available to the Block C prisoner are therefore the strategies of retreatism, a conscious exception from the deathly environment. In the beginning, this is always adaptation. It is always conscious. But, as time goes by, there is always the doubt that conscious adaptation is only a cloak concealing a complete participation in the deathliness of the Block.
Every man in Canaan dies there. Twice. There is death absolute, and death strategic. There may be years between. The men in Block C may well be the only men in the world who have experienced death, studied it, discussed it, and reached conclusions
about it. On the other hand, there may be six or ten more Canaans in this country alone. There may be thousands of dead men in the world — whole communities of them discussing their deaths in terms of pieces removed from a chessboard, folded hands in a card game.
How can we know?
There are other deaths than strategic and absolute, but I have not seen them in Canaan during my stay. Luis, who has been here longer than any of us, tells us about death by resignation, death by fear, death by the literal coming apart of the personality. Not merely premature burial, which we all discovered, death-before-death. Luis has provided us with accounts of those who have discovered destruction-before-death. They do not last as long, in the between-time, so I am told.
Perhaps if it were not for Luis, many more of us would find destruction rather than the soft death. But Luis is a master strategist — a strategist for all of us, not merely for himself. He is an environmental engineer, perhaps the greatest of them all, because the environment which provides him with his clay is surely the poorest of them all.
Luis Dalquier has taught me more than any other man I know.
He was a gambler of genius. He was not the greatest hustler in the world, by any means, but he must have been one of the greatest players. Talent he had in truckloads, but it was talent he didn’t know how to exploit.
The first thing which makes any man a great poker player is an absolutely firm disbelief in luck. Luis knew there was no such thing, and thereby gained an advantage over virtually every other man that ever saw a hole card.
A sucker, like everybody else, can read a stud hand as it lies. He knows the probabilities of his improving to the various potentials which reside in his incomplete hand. He knows the possibilities inherent in his opponents’ hands, and he knows the probability distributions relevant to their improvement. (Anyone too stupid to calculate this much doesn’t even rate as a card player.) What separates the greats from the goods is the control and the judgment and the respect which is added to that basic knowledge. No matter how sharp a guy’s probability theory might be, no matter how perceptive his psychology, if he believes even a tiny bit in luck then he is a loser at heart. Because a man who knows that luck exists knows that it is luck which decides his eventual fate in the game. Once a man starts believing that his next card, or his opponent’s card, or the card his opponent already has in his hole is determined and/or determinable by fortune, fate, kismet, destiny, the cosmic pattern, the outlay of the universe, the will of Allah, or the great unknown, he is a loser. Dalquier was not a loser.
The second thing which makes any man a great card player is feel. The great card player, like Luis, is never a thinker, a calculator, a concentrator. Poker is the toughest game in the world on a man who tries to rivet himself into the game. No one has perfect concentration. You can have everything in the world going for you and still shit out through simple tiredness. But not Luis — Luis didn’t ever need to figure the odds in his head. He didn’t need to debate the chances inside his head once a showdown was reached. He didn’t need to make his consciousness monitor his betting. It flowed through him like an electric current. He knew it all by feel. It didn’t come naturally to him, by any means. It was programmed into him by hard math and hard practice and hard psychology. It came to him slowly, that feel, but it came. He won it.
Nobody ever told Luis that the cardinal principle of card-playing is that to bluff is to conceal, not to deceive. He discovered that himself, built into his growing understanding of the game. He was an automatic concealer. He never lied because he had a wholly natural in-built total disregard for the truth. He never knew the meaning of truth, never even thought that it might have a meaning. To him, truth had just as little referent as luck (or God, or kindness, or altruism, or heroism, or humanity — Luis disbelieved an awful lot of things).
I don’t mean to imply that Luis never lost a game of cards in his life. Even pinball machines could beat him eventually, for all his perfect timing and magnificent butterfly-flipping. He was a joy to watch playing pinball (it was said), because he was practically in there with the ball, with the circuits and the clickety-click of the score. But the machines always got the better of him in the end, because that’s what they were designed to do. They just kept boosting up the replay score until it needed a miracle to make it. Luis didn’t deal in miracles, only in practicalities. He was no wonder worker.
And so it was with packs of cards and racehorses. You can never know it all. The ultimate judgment and control is always beyond you. That’s what keeps a poker player playing. No man has a God-given right to win; he can only come out so far ahead relative to the cards. It was that theory of relativity that kept Luis in the game, getting better and better, without end.
Luis made some small fortunes in his time, but he was only a player, never a hustler. The game isn’t life — it’s an excerpt from life. After the game, win or lose, you have to come back to living. Luis was a master strategist at that, too; but, as everyone in the world knows, the human race is fixed — the deck is well and truly stacked. Not only can’t you win them all, you can’t win, period. Dalquier had the talent to clean out the world, but that in itself was self-defeating, because his talent told him he couldn’t do it.
He made competition for himself simply by telling the truth about how good he was. People hated him for that, and they longed to see him proved wrong. Crowds rejoiced every time Dalquier lost a play. They had a warped idea about what sort of thing constituted proof (and wrongness). Most great artists can win themselves any amount of respect and admiration, but Luis went a little short of that, and made himself more enemies than another man (with a different temperament) might have done. Luis was always one to put the screws on a bit too hard. He didn’t just beat a man; he beat him good. He didn’t go around rubbing people’s faces in the dirt and stomping them, nor did he sneer and laugh. But he was a hard, cold man, not a hustler — he was too clear-sighted, too great a player, for that.
He was an alienated man, was Luis. The world was on the other side of the fence. A lot of men would have paid good money to watch Dalquier crawl, but he never did. Even when he was beaten through and through, one way or another he’d always walk away. No one ever saw him crucified. They all loved to see his money slide across a table. They all hungered for his blood to follow it. Many men were so hungry for that blood money that they convinced themselves God and luck were going to give it to them. That kind of man always gave Luis his money back and a lot more besides. They were the easy ones in the game. They were absolute hell outside of it.
Dalquier won, if anything, too much on the table. He left himself without sufficient cards to play outside of the games. That was Dalquier’s problem — he loved the game too much. He played the game so well that he gave himself too many handicaps once the game was over. The chips he couldn’t cash were the ones he put on too many men’s shoulders.
He was immovable. But the world is irresistible, and we all know what happens when the irresistible force launches itself at the immovable object. The object simply disappears. Gone — into another world. Canaan.
I concede to the people who sent Luis to his present resting place that for once they were right. He is mad. Raving mad. Somewhere along the line, he came apart.
The thing that his madness did to him was the worst thing imaginable. It left him his talent, his skill, his feel. All it did was take away his need to win.
Luis Dalquier is the greatest gambler I know. One of the greatest. But he doesn’t care whether he wins or loses. It just doesn’t matter a damn to him.
So what is he?
Nothing.
He’s a paradox, a human vacuum.
He’s taught me all I need to know about strategy and survival. He’s taught us all. He’s given to us everything that he can’t use himself. He’s been broken by the crooked wheel we call the world, slapped out by a hand that came from a stacked deck. He was cheated.
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But he was never proved wrong.
We probably owe what we are to Luis Dalquier more than to ourselves. All of us.
We never win, because in the game of cat and mouse you play with us there is no winning in the rules. There is no provision made for us to win.
But you can’t prove us wrong. You can’t diminish us at all.
Madman’s Dance
You Can Drive a Horse to Water, but a Pencil Must Be Lead
Snow is falling in thick white flakes from a dark gray sky. It is crisp and deep in the ground, smothering the frozen soil. There are tall evergreens all around — their trunks are straight and vertical, like the bars of a cage. No tracks are visible in the snow, but wet black patches on the lower branches of the white-cloaked trees testify to the recent passage of some fairly large creature. I think I can see it, not far off, standing stock-still amid the shadows, but my vision is confused by the diagonally sweeping snow, and I cannot be sure.
As I strive to determine which of several shadows might possibly be alive, other living beings tramp into view from the opposite direction. They are men, wrapped up tightly in thick woolen clothes, wearing tight-fitting caps and earmuffs. At each step their furry, knee-length boots sink several inches into the snow. There are five of them, marching in single file. Four are carrying guns; the fifth has a stout wooden pole some seven feet long.
All are looking quickly from side to side as they walk, as if they think each shadow might be a man or monster in disguise. At a signal from their leader they stop. Silently, he motions one man to the right, another to the left, urgently indicating a spot where he has — or thinks he has — seen something.
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